


Will the world remember you when you fall?

by zhelaniye



Category: Deadline Gallipoli (TV), Flammen & Citronen | Flame & Citron (2008), Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Hannibal AU, Lonely Soldiers, M/M, Murder, World War II, my first fic ever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 19:48:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10446051
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zhelaniye/pseuds/zhelaniye
Summary: He needed so many things but, above all, he needed to stop listening to that word, hanging heavily in the air as a death sentence. “Citron”.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [levi163](https://archiveofourown.org/users/levi163/gifts).



> This is my first fic ever, so it may (or may not) be a mess. English is not my first language so any mistake or incoherence is purely mine.  
> I wanted to thank the amazing @ravenstag_ (twitter user) for creating this pairing, choosing the title and encouraging me to write.

Shoulders askew, hands in his pocket and chin raised up high. The monotonous steps and their premeditated rhythm show nothing more than a confident man, who knows where he’s going but is no hurry. But beneath the thick jacket intended to fight the typical cold of the late-autumn nights in Denmark (mission at which it fails miserably), hides a man whose purpose is not as innocent as it seems. A man whose eyes darken every second, in synchrony with his steps, counting the seconds and meters left like a clock who hangs in an empty living room on a Sunday afternoon, with a detached determination.

His hands slowly curl into fists as he approaches the wooden door in the white house with too many flowers, too much ornamentation, too much of everything a house is not supposed to have in the middle of the war. He takes the marble stairs slowly, as if each one of the personally insults him, and for the first time in years thinks about his mother, what she would say if she saw not only him but his eyes, his already bottomless eyes. “It’s war, mum, this needs to be done” he would say. And she would only stare at him for a while shaking her head, and her eyes would stop at the crinkles at the corner of his eyes and she would frown because he is too young (he should be too young) to have so many of them.

“It is war indeed, my son, but you don’t need to do this”. And suddenly, as only a few feet separate him from fulfilling his destiny who awaits at him behind that polished door, another face flashes through his mind. A soft angled face who still hasn’t got fully ridded of its boyish features, a fact that is unsuccessfully covered by a bushy moustache.

It isn’t exactly the memory of that face the thing who makes his stomach churn and his chest ache as if he’s been punched, but the distant echo of the laugh that spills through those lips, lighting everything, filling every corner of his soul, even those he thought the war had occupied forever, those spaces of him he thought he would never get back. His words come out loud this time, not longer speaking to himself, and they come out hoarse, as if he’d been screaming for an hour. “Yes, yes I need to do it”, he thinks to himself and he kicks the door open, decided to embrace his destiny and whatever it threw at him.

The unmistakable muffled sound of someone trying to be excessively quiet comes from upstairs and he slowly, carefully but with a foreign sense of calm he can’t (he won’t) explain to himself starts to climb. He reaches the top of the stairs and two impossibly large corridors extend at both sides of him. He chooses one and passes so many closed doors, all white, all clean, and all infuriatingly different from every other door in this godforsaken city. He reaches the end of the hall and, as if in a dream, he knows before opening the door that he has found what he was looking for. The door creaks as it opens and it makes such a mundane contrast to the elegance of the rest of the house he feels like laughing. Instead, he would feel like laughing if he wasn’t about to do what he was about to do.

The room is big, bright, calming and undoubtedly beautiful. It was not exactly minimalistic but much less decorated than what he expected. He absently thinks that every piece of furniture (even the carpet) would allow him to eat for a week. But none of that matters now, because a man is sitting at the couch, placed in the center of the room at facing him. Glancing at him, even at what he can guess are his final moments, in the unmistakable pride of a man who is used to be in charge, to be obeyed and listened, and specially to be feared. “But I don’t fear you now”, he thinks, “I’m the one with the gun”.

He finds, surprised, that a small part of him, what’s left of the young man’s soul that inhabited his body before the war began, isn’t so sure about that, and his hand trembled as he reached for the inner pocket of his jacket and grabbed the cold and reassuring metal of his gun.

He pointed the gun at the German’s head and some voice at the back of his mind, which he believes is his conscience, tells him it shouldn’t be that easy, but he quickly silenced it. Now was not the time, war was not the time to have a conscience. Not when a German officer was staring at you, still unaffected by the gun pointed at his head.

But then something at the German’s expression changed, recognition flickered through his eyes, too fast gone to notice if you weren’t looking. But he was looking. At it left him frozen into his place, with his arm extended out and the gun, now loaded and ready to fire, hanging in the air as if he was mocking him. Fear paralyzed every fiber on his body, because if he was recognized just by sight, then they knew about him. And if they knew about him, they knew about that other person whose name he would never mention or think about at a murder scene, too bright to let the darkness of the war reach him, to pure to risk blood staining it. A name who warmed him from the inside out, who guided his steps from door to door, who prevented him from drowning in the blood he carried with him when he closed those damn elegant doors, those doors he would be seeing in his dreams forever, or so it seemed.

They couldn’t know about him, they were not allowed to ruin the only sacred place left on this earth, the only spot he would ever call home and not think of it as an empty word, the one place in this European winter, the coldest one, in which warmth still existed. The one and only proof of the existence of goodness, of love, left.

The German’s mouth curled in the beginning of a smirk and he noticed how it was an effortless movement, as if the man’s face was already used to showing cruelty to nameless people, to strangers. And he knew what was coming, he knew what was going to happen, and his fingers pulled the trigger, but not fast enough. A world manages to escape the German’s lips, one last short word hanging in the air a body from a rope, deafening every other sound, even the explosion of the gun, the blood dripping to the ground from the open, clean hole in the man’s forehead.

A word was everything he left, but a single word has enough to send him to his knees, his entire body trembling. He needed to run away, he needed to look for documents who might or might not be of use to the resistance, he needed to run back home and closed that damned wooden door and never look back, he needed to curl around a chest listening to the only heartbeat he cared about in this entire world. He needed so many things but, above all, he needed to stop listening the world, hanging heavily in the air as a death sentence. “Citron”.

 

-

 

He opened his eyes and the first thing he noticed was the darkness, but it was not an unfamiliar darkness and definitely not the kind of dark you found when you opened your eyes in the back of a truck, surrounded by leather boots, leading you nowhere.

The second thing he noticed was the feeling of warmth underneath the winter cold, a quiet and private feeling not even the biggest fire could grant.

And the third thing he noticed was the body lying at his side under the sheets and the thick soviet blanket they managed to obtain to try to fight the upcoming winter. He thought about his dream, still not fully convinced it was a dream, still not sure enough about his safety, not his own but this other man, the one he could name now, in the intimacy of their shared refuge who looked like a home now. “Ellis”, he whispered, and it came out as if in prayer.

Ellis stirred at his side and his heart clenched. He didn’t think he would ever get used to his beauty, his softness, the private smile he reserved just for him, the smile he was wearing now. He briefly thought that he’d seen too many things during his life to actually be able to believe in god but, if he did, he would believe in this man.

“Hey, Jørgen” the Brit whispered, and there it was. He was Jørgen, not Citron, that annoying voice at the back of his mind shouted again, but he did not silence it this time. He let it ring, staring in awe at the light of Ellis’ eyes and how it was visible still in the most complete darkness. “Come here”.

And he did, curling around the smaller man, feeling the warmth of this skin, inhaling his scent. His chest ached, his heart felt too big for the space beneath his ribs and his eyes were uncharacteristically wet. But then, then Ellis moved to touch his forehead with his lips, his divine lips, and something too precious about how his moustache briefly brushed his skin broke him and a sob wrenched his way out of the depths of his throat.

“What happens, angel?” Ellis whispered to him as if he deserved him, as if a blood-filthy man like him had any right to be called such a thing by him, his guide, his light, his sanity, his everything.

“I don’t want you to be here” he said, and he barely recognized his own voice, distorted by the sobbing, and he realized it had been years since he cried, since he felt at all. He wanted to tell him he deserved to watch the sunset every afternoon and have a warm dinner every night, he deserved better than some nasty bed sheets that were so rough they left you sore, he deserved to be able to close his front door but not lock it, to be able to talk without fearing being heard. He deserved not to startle when a truck stopped in the street, and he deserved to be able to trust another footsteps again. But all he managed to say was “you deserve more”.

Ellis looked startled and sit up on his elbows. His pupils widened and when he spoke, he did it with that urgency tone people used when they desperately needed to be believed. He’d heard it before, at interrogations, and he promised to himself he would die before ever hearing that tone in his angel’s voice again.

“You need to listen to me. You keep thinking I would be safer if I wasn’t with you. Well, I wouldn’t” the words all came out in a rush, and Citron could do nothing but marvel at the emotions reflected on them “I would fight with or without you, Jørgen, but the only thing keeping me from going out and never coming back, the only thing keeping me from being so reckless that death won’t even have to make an effort to find me, the only thing helping me to sleep at night, is you. I would wither without you, I would drown in all the blood I’ve seen in the corners of the alleys where unnoticed trucks stop at night. You keep me breathing, you keep me fighting, you keep me grounded and here. You, and your nightmares, and your demons, and every second of violence we’ve both witnessed. You and your light you try so hard to darken, you and the reflection of the morning sky in your eyes, you and the way you whisper your love to me in Danish thinking I don’t know what I’m saying but I understand you every time”.

Jørgen barely notices his tear-stained cheeks and he grabs the boy by his shoulders, the boy who has somehow managed to save his soul and his humanity throughout all this, and he kisses him hard while he’s still speaking. Citron actually prays for the first time in his life, he prays to every god he forsook so long ago for Ellis to see the depth of your heart and find the beauty amongst the debris of his soul, as he always does, as he always has done. Citron prays for him to understand in his body what he is not able to put into words.

And he does. His boy, his blessing, his miracle understand him once again and he whispers “I love you too, Jørgen” into the kiss. And then Citron places himself on top of Ellis’ body and neither of them speaks again, too absorbed in each other’s body to care in the slightest. And for a few hours, in a basement’s bed in the heart of the occupied Copenhagen, the war doesn’t exist, the bombs don’t fall and the sound of millions of lives being shattered is replaced by muffled moans, the sound of a mouth against naked skin and that divine laughter, the one that makes Jørgen believe in god.


End file.
